Company that built multi-million rand gov’t site gets serious Facebook hate

Cherry Online Designs wasn’t all that well-known, until yesterday when it was revealed to be the company behind a provincial government website believed to have cost up to R140-million.

While that news got its name out there, it opened it up to a whole pile of social media hate. A cursory glance at its Facebook page reveals a few more likes than the nine it had yesterday, as well as a litany of abuse.

We’ve screen-grabbed a selection of some of the tamer posts to give you an idea of the kind of hatred it’s been getting.

Cherry Online Design has been linked to several other companies involved in the tender as well as Tumi Ntsele, a prominent businessman in the country who won the contract to build the site. In fact, a number of them share the same phone number and address.

Given that, it’s unlikely that anyone from Cherry Online Design will respond the criticisms leveled at it on its Facebook page.

The Free State government hasn’t been spared online vitriol either. A glance at a post on the multi-million rand site reveals a number of angry comments including these gems:

There was however a special kind of anger reserved for the fact that a multi-million rand site couldn’t even keep out the obvious kind of spam:

How obvious was the spam? Here are a few examples from the site: